Part 2 Chapter 1

On The Man Called Christ

I: The God in the Cave

This sketch of the human story began in a cave; the cave which popular
science associates with the cave-man and in which practical discovery has
really found archaic drawings of animals. The second half of human history,
which was like a new creation of the world, also begins in a cave. There is
even a shadow of such a fancy in the fact that animals were again present; for
it was a cave used as a stable by the mountaineers of the uplands about
Bethlehem; who still drive their cattle into such holes and caverns at night.
It was here that a homeless couple had crept underground with the cattle when
the doors of the crowded caravanserai had been shut in their faces; and it was
here beneath the very feet of the passersby, in a cellar under the very floor
of the world, that Jesus Christ was born But in that second creation there was
indeed something symbolical in the roots of the primeval rock or the horns of
the prehistoric herd. God also was a CaveMan, and, had also traced strange
shapes of creatures, curiously colored upon the wall of the world ; but the
pictures that he made had come to life.

A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end has
repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands that had
made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle.
Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of
our faith is founded. It is at least like a jest in this; that it is something
which the scientific critic cannot see. He laboriously explains the difficulty
which we have always defiantly and almost derisively exaggerated; and mildly
condemns as improbable something that we have almost madly exalted as
incredible; as something that would be much too good to be true, except that it
is true. When that contrast between the cosmic creation and the little local
infancy has been repeated, reiterated, underlined, emphasized, exulted in,
sung, shouted, roared, not to say howled, in a hundred thousand hymns, carols,
rhymes, rituals pictures, poems, and popular sermons, it may be suggested that
we hardly need a higher critic to draw our attention to something a little odd
about it; especially one of the sort that seems to take a long time to see a
joke, even his own joke. But about this contrast and combination of ideas one
thing may be said here, because it is relevant to the whole thesis of this
book. The sort of modern critic of whom I speak is generally much impressed
with the importance of education in life and the importance of psychology in
education. That sort of man is never tired of telling us that first impressions
fix character by the law of causation; and he will become quite nervous if a
child's visual sense is poisoned by the wrong colors on a golliwog or his
nervous system prematurely shaken by a cacophonous rattle. Yet he will think us
very narrow-minded, if we say that this is exactly why there really is a
difference between being brought up as a Christian and being brought up as a
Jew or a Moslem or an atheist. T he difference is that every Catholic child has
learned from pictures, and even every Protestant child from stones, this
incredible combination of contrasted ideas as one of the very first impressions
on his mind. It is not merely a theological difference. It is a psychological
difference which can outlast any theologies It really is, as that sort of
scientist loves to say about anything, incurable. Any agnostic or atheist whose
childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether be likes it
or not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind must
regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown
strength that sustains the stars. His instincts and imagination can still
connect them, when his reason can no longer see the need of the connection; for
him there will always be some savor of religion about the mere picture of a
mother and a baby; some hint of mercy and softening about the mere mention of
the dreadful name of God. But the two ideas are not naturally or necessarily
combined. They would not be necessarily combined for an ancient Greek or a
Chinaman, even for Aristotle or Confucius. It is no more inevitable to connect
God with an infant than to connect gravitation with a kitten. It has been
created in our minds by Christmas because we are Christians; because we are
psychological Christians even when we are not theological ones. In other words,
this combination of ideas has emphatically, in the much disputed phrase,
altered human nature. There is really a difference between the man who knows it
and the man who does not. It may not be a difference of moral worth, for the
Moslem or the Jew might be worthier according to his lights; but it is a plain
fact about the crossing of two particular lights, the conjunction of two stars
in our particular horoscope. Omnipotence and impotence, or divinity and
infancy, do definitely make a sort of epigram which a million repetitions
cannot turn into a platitude. It is not unreasonable to call it unique.

Bethlehem is emphatically a place where extremes meet. Here begins, it
is needless to say, another mighty influence for the humanization of
Christendom. If the world wanted what is called a non-controversial aspect of
Christianity, it would probably select Christmas. Yet it is obviously bound up
with what is supposed to be a controversial aspect (I could never at any stage
of my opinions imagine why); the respect paid to the Blessed Virgin. When I was
a boy a more Puritan generation objected to a statue upon my parish church
representing the Virgin and Child. After much controversy, they compromised by
taking away the Child. One would think that this was even more corrupted with
Mariolatry, unless the mother was counted less dangerous when deprived of a
sort of weapon. But the practical difficulty is also a parable. You cannot chip
away the statue of a mother from all round that of a newborn child. You cannot
suspend the new-born child in mid-air; indeed you cannot really have a statue
of a newborn child at all. Similarly, you cannot suspend the idea of a newborn
child in the void or think of him without thinking of his mother. You cannot
visit the child without visiting the mother, you cannot in common human life
approach the child except through the mother. If we are to think of Christ in
this aspect at all, the other idea follows I as it is followed in history. We
must either leave Christ out of Christmas, or Christmas out of Christ, or we
must admit, if only as we admit it in an old picture, that those holy heads are
too near together for the haloes not to mingle and cross.

It might be suggested, in a somewhat violent image, that nothing had
happened in that fold or crack in the great gray hills except that the whole
universe had been turned inside out. I mean that all the eyes of wonder and
worship which had been turned outwards to the largest thing were now. turned
inward to the smallest. The very image will suggest all that multitudinous
marvel of converging eyes that makes so much of the colored Catholic imagery
like a peacock's tail., But it is true in a sense that God who bad been only a
circumference was seen as a centre; and a centre is infinitely small. It is
true that the spiritual spiral henceforward works inwards instead of outwards,
and in that sense is centripetal and not centrifugal. The faith becomes, in
more ways than one, a religion of little things. But its traditions in art and'
literature and popular fable have quite sufficiently attested, as has been
said, this particular paradox of the divine being in the cradle Perhaps they
have not so clearly emphasized the significance o f the divine being in the
cave. Curiously enough, indeed, tradition has not very clearly emphasized the
cave. It is a familiar fact that the Bethlehem scene has been represented in
every possible setting of time and country, of landscape and architecture; and
it is a wholly happy and admirable fact that men have conceived it as quite
different according to their different individual traditions and tastes. But
while all have realized that it was a stable, not so many have realized that it
was a cave. Some critics have even been so silly as to suppose that there was
some contradiction between the stable and the cave; in which case they cannot
know much about caves or stables in Palestine. As they see differences that are
not there, it is needless to add that they do not see differences that are
there. When a well-known critic says, for instance, that Christ being born in a
rocky cavern is like Mithras having sprung alive out of a rock, it sounds like
a parody upon comparative religion. There is such a thing as the point of a
story, even if it is a story in the sense of a lie. And the notion of a hero
appearing, like Pallas from the brain of Zeus, mature and without a mother, is
obviously the very opposite of the idea of a god being born like an ordinary
baby and entirely dependent on a mother. Whichever ideal we might prefer, we
should surely see that they are contrary ideals. It is as stupid to connect
them because they both contain a substance called stone as to identify the
punishment of the Deluge with the baptism in the Jordan because they both
contain a substance called water. Whether as a myth or a mystery, Christ was
obviously conceived as born in a hole in the rocks primarily because it marked
the position of one outcast and homeless. Nevertheless it is true, as I have
said, that the cave has not been so commonly or so clearly used as a symbol as
the other realities that surrounded the first Christmas.

And the reason for this also refers to the very nature of that new
world. It was in a sense the difficulty of a new dimension. Christ was not only
born on the level of the world, but even lower than the world. The first act of
the divine drama was enacted, not only on no stage set up above the sightseer,
but on a dark and curtained stage sunken out of sight; and that is an idea very
difficult to express in most modes of artistic expression. It is the idea of
simultaneous happenings on different levels of life. Something like it might
have been attempted in the more archaic and decorative medieval art. But the
more the artists learned of realism and perspective, the less they could depict
at once the angels in the heavens and the shepherds on the hills, and the glory
in the darkness that was under the hills. Perhaps it could have been best
conveyed by the characteristic expedient of some of the medieval guilds, when
they wheeled about the streets a theater with three stages one above the other,
with heaven above the earth and hell under the earth. But in the riddle of
Bethlehem it was heaven that was under the earth.

There is in that alone the touch of a revolution, as of the world turned
upside down. It would be vain to attempt to say anything adequate, or anything
new, about the change which this conception of a deity born like an outcast or
even an outlaw bad upon the whole conception of law and its duties to the poor
and outcast. It is profoundly true to say that after that moment there could be
no slaves. There could be and were people bearing that legal title, until the
Church was strong enough to weed them out, but there could be no more of the
pagan repose in the mere advantage to the state of keeping it a servile state.
Individuals became important, in a sense in which no instruments can be
important. A man could not be a means to an end, at any rate to any other man's
end. All this popular and fraternal element in the story has been rightly
attached by tradition to the episode of the Shepherds; the hinds who found
themselves talking face to face with the princes of heaven. But there is
another aspect of the popular element as represented by the shepherds which has
not perhaps been so fully developed; and which is more directly relevant here.

Men of the people, like the shepherds, men of the popular tradition, had
everywhere been the makers of the mythologies. It was they who had felt most
directly, with least check or chill from philosophy or the corrupt cults of
civilization, the need we have already considered; the images that were
adventures of the imagination; the mythology that was a sort of search the
tempting and tantalizing hints of something half human in nature; the dumb
significance of seasons and special places. They bad best understood that the
soul of a landscape is a story and the soul of a story is a personality. But
rationalism had already begun to rot away these really irrational though
imaginative treasures of the peasant; even as systematic slavery had eaten the
peasant out of house and home. Upon all such peasantries everywhere there was
descending a dusk and twilight of disappointment, in the hour when these few
men discovered what they sought. Everywhere else Arcadia was fading from the
forest. Pan was dead and the shepherds were scattered like sheep. And though no
man knew it, the hour was near which was to end and to fulfill all things; and
though no man heard it, there was one far-off cry in an unknown tongue upon the
heaving wilderness of the mountains. The shepherds had found their Shepherd.

And the thing they found was of a kind with the things they sought. The
populace had been wrong in many things; but they had not been wrong in
believing that holy things could have a habitation and that divinity need not
disdain the limits of time and space. And the barbarian who conceived the
crudest fancy about the sun being stolen and hidden in a box, or the wildest
myth about the god being rescued and his enemy deceived with a stone, was
nearer to the secret of the cave and knew more about the crisis of the world,
than all those in the circle of cities round the Mediterranean who had become
content with cold abstractions or cosmopolitan generalizations; than all those
who were spinning thinner and thinner threads of thought out of the
transcendentalism of Plato or the orientalism of Pythagoras. The place that the
shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic; it was not a place
of myths allegorized or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a
place of dreams come true. Since that hour no mythologies have been made in the
world. Mythology is a search.

We all know that the popular presentation of this popular story, in so
many miracle plays and carols, has given to the shepherds the costume, the
language, and the landscape of the separate English and European countryside.
We all know that one shepherd will talk in a Somerset dialect or another talk
of driving his sheep from Conway towards the Clyde. Most of us know by this
time bow true is that error, how wise, how artistic, how intensely Christian
and Catholic is that anachronism. But some who have seen it in these scenes of
medieval rusticity have perhaps not seen it in another sort of poetry, which it
is sometimes the fashion to call artificial rather than artistic. I fear that
many modem critics Will see only a faded classicism in the fact that men like
Crashaw and Herrick conceived the shepherds of Bethlehem under the form of the
shepherds of Virgil. Yet they were profoundly right; and in turning their
Bethlehem play into a Latin Eclogue they took up one of the most important
links in human history. Virgil, as we have already seen, does stand for all
that saner heathenism that had overthrown the insane heathenism of human
sacrifice; but the very fact that even the Virgilian virtues and the sane
heathenism were in incurable decay is the whole problem to which the revelation
to the shepherds is the solution. If the world bad ever had the chance to grow
weary of being demoniac, it might have been healed merely by becoming sane. But
if it bad grown weary even of being sane, what was to happen, except what did
happen? Nor is it false to conceive the Arcadian shepherd of the Eclogues as
rejoicing in what did happen. One of the Eclogues has even been claimed as a
prophecy of what did happen.

But it is quite as much in the tone and incidental diction of the great
poet that we feel the potential sympathy with the great event; and even in
their own human phrases the voices of the Virgilian shepherds might more than
once have broken upon more than the tenderness of Italy . . . . . Incipe, parve
puer, risu cognoscere matrem . . . . . They might have found in that strange
place all that was best in the last traditions of the Latins; and something
better than a wooden idol standing up forever for the pillar of the human
family; a household god. But they and all the other mythologists would be
justified in rejoicing that the event had fulfilled not merely the mysticism
but the materialism of mythology. Mythology had many sins; but it had not been
wrong in being as carnal as the Incarnation. With something of the ancient
voice that was supposed to have rung through the groves, it could cry again,
'We have seen, he hath seen us, a visible god.' So the ancient shepherds might
have danced, and their feet have been beautiful upon the mountains, rejoicing
over the philosophers. But the philosophers had also heard.

It is still a strange story, though an old one, bow they came out of
orient lands, crowned with the majesty of kings and clothed with something of
the mystery of magicians. That truth that is tradition has wisely remembered
them almost as unknown quantities, as mysterious as their mysterious and
melodious names; Melchior, Caspar, Balthazar. But there came with them all that
world of wisdom that had watched the stars in Chaldea and the sun in Persia;
and we shall not be wrong if we see in them the same curiosity that moves all
the sages. They would stand for the same human ideal if their names had really
been Confucius or Pythagoras or Plato. They were those who sought not tales but
the truth of things; and since their thirst for truth was itself a thirst for
God, they also have bad their reward. But even in order to understand that
reward, we must understand that for philosophy as much as mythology, that
reward was the completion of the incomplete.

Such learned men would doubtless have come, as these learned men did
come, to find themselves confirmed in much that was true in their own
traditions and right in their own reasoning. Confucius would have found a new
foundation for the family in the very reversal of the Holy Family; Buddha would
have looked upon a new renunciation, of stars rather than jewels and divinity
than royalty. These learned men would still have the right to say, or rather a
new right to say, that there was truth in their old teaching. But after all
these learned men would have come to learn. They would have come to complete
their conceptions with something they had not yet conceived; even to balance
their imperfect universe with something they might once have contradicted.
Buddha would have come from his impersonal paradise to worship a person.
Confucius would have come from his temples of ancestor-worship to worship a
child.

We must grasp from the first this character in the new cosmos; that it
was larger than the old cosmos. In that sense Christendom is larger than
creation; as creation had been before Christ. It included things that had not
been there; it also included the things that bad been there. The point happens
to be well illustrated in this example of Chinese piety, but it would be true
of other pagan virtues or pagan beliefs. Nobody can doubt that a reasonable
respect for parents is part of a gospel in which God himself was subject in
childhood to earthly parents. But the other sense in which the --parents were
subject to him does introduce an idea that is not Confucian. The infant Christ
is not like the infant Confucius; our mysticism conceives him in an immortal
infancy. I do not know what Confucius would have done with the Bambino, had it
come to life in his arms as it did in the arms of St. Francis. But this is true
in relation to all the other religions and philosophies; it is the challenge of
the Church. The Church contains what the world does not contain. Life itself
does not provide as she does for all sides of life. That every other single
system is narrow and insufficient compared to this one; that is not a
rhetorical boast; it is a real fact and a real dilemma. Where is the Holy Child
amid the Stoics and the ancestor-worshippers? Where is Our Lady of the Moslems,
a woman made for no man and set above all angels? Where is St. Michael of the
monks of Buddha, rider and master of the trumpets, guarding for every soldier
the honor of the sword? What could St. Thomas Aquinas do with the mythology of
Brahmanism, he who set forth all the science and rationality and even
rationalism of Christianity? Yet even if we compare Aquinas with Aristotle, at
the other extreme of reason, we shall find the same sense of something added.
Aquinas could understand the most logical parts of Aristotle; it is doubtful if
Aristotle could have understood the most mystical parts of Aquinas.

Even where we can hardly call the Christian greater, we are forced to
call him larger. But it is so to whatever philosophy or heresy or modern
movement we may turn. How would Francis the Troubadour have fared among the
Calvinists, or for that matter among the Utilitarians of the Manchester School?
Yet men like Bossuet and Pascal could be as stern and logical as any Calvinist
or Utilitarian. How would St. Joan of Arc, a woman waving on men to war with
the sword, have fared among the Quakers or the Doukhabors or the Tolstoyan sect
of pacifists? Yet any number of Catholic saints have spent their lives in
preaching peace and preventing wars. It is the same with all the modern
attempts at Syncretism. They are never able to make something larger than the
Creed without leaving something out. I do not mean leaving out something divine
but something human; the flag or the inn or the boy's tale of battle or the
hedge at the end of the field. The Theosophists build a pantheon; but it is
only a pantheon for pantheists. They call a Parliament of Religions as a
reunion of all the peoples; but it is only a reunion of all the prigs. Yet
exactly such a pantheon had been set up two thousand years before by the shores
of the Mediterranean; and Christians were invited to set up the image of Jesus
side by side with the image of Jupiter, of Mithras, of Osiris, of Atys, or of
Ammon. It was the -point of history. refusal of the Christians that was the
turning If the Christians had accepted, they and the whole world would have
certainly, in a grotesque but exact metaphor, gone to pot. They would all have
been boiled down to one lukewarm liquid in that great pot of cosmopolitan
corruption in which all the other myths and mysteries were already melting. It
was an awful and an appalling escape. Nobody understands the nature of the
Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does
not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broad-mindedness and.
the brotherhood of all religions.

Here it is the important point that the Magi, who stand for mysticism
and philosophy, are truly conceived as seeking something new and even as
finding something unexpected. That tense sense of crisis which still tingles in
the Christmas story and even in every Christmas celebration, accentuates the
idea of a search and a discovery. The discovery is, in this case, truly a
scientific discovery. For the other mystical figures in the miracle play; for
the angel and the mother, the shepherds and the soldiers of Herod, there may be
aspects both simpler and more supernatural, more elemental or more emotional.
But the Wise Men must be seeking wisdom; and for them there must be a light
also in the intellect. And this is the light; that the Catholic creed is
catholic and that nothing else is catholic. The philosophy of the Church is
universal. The philosophy of the philosophers was not universal. Had Plato and
Pythagoras and Aristotle stood for an instant in the light that came out of
that little cave, they would have known that their own light was not universal.

It is far from certain, indeed, that they did not know it already.
Philosophy also, like mythology, bad very much the air of a search. It is the
realization of this truth that gives its traditional majesty and mystery to the
figures of the Three Kings; the discovery that religion is broader than
philosophy and that this is the broadest of religions, contained within this
narrow space. The Magicians were gazing at the strange pentacle with the human
triangle reversed; and they have never come to the end of their calculations
about it. For it is the paradox of that group in the cave, that while our
emotions about it are of childish simplicity, our thoughts about it can branch
with a never-ending complexity. And we can never reach the end even of our own
ideas about the child who was a father and the mother who was a child.

We might well be content to say that mythology had come with the
shepherds and philosophy with the philosophers; and' that it only remained for
them to combine in the recognition of religion. But there was a third element
that must not be ignored and one which that religion forever refuses to ignore,
in any revel or reconciliation. There was present in the primary scenes of the
drama that Enemy that had rotted the legends with lust and frozen the theories
into atheism, but which answered the direct challenge with something of that
more direct method which we have seen in the conscious cult of the demons. In
the description of that demon-worship, of the devouring detestation of
innocence shown in the works of its witchcraft and the most inhuman of its
human sacrifice, I have said less of its indirect and secret penetration of the
saner paganism; the soaking of mythological imagination with sex; the rise of
imperial pride into insanity. But both the indirect and the direct influence
make themselves felt in the drama of Bethlehem. A ruler under the Roman
suzerainty, probably equipped and surrounded with the Roman ornament and order
though himself of eastern blood, seems in that hour to have felt stirring
within him the spirit of strange things. We all know the story of how Herod,
alarmed at some rumor of a mysterious rival, remembered the wild gesture of the
capricious despots of Asia and ordered a massacre of suspects of the new
generation of the populace. Everyone knows the story; but not everyone has
perhaps noted its place in the story of the strange religions of men. Not
everybody has seen the significance even of its very contrast with the
Corinthian columns and Roman pavement of that conquered and superficially
civilized world. Only, as the purpose in his dark spirit began to show and
shine in the eyes of the Admen, a seer might perhaps have seen something like a
great gray ghost that looked over his shoulder; have seen behind him filling
the dome of night and hovering for the last time over history that vast and
fearful face that was Moloch of the Carthaginians; awaiting his last tribute
from a ruler of the races of Shem. The demons also, in that first festival of
Christmas, feasted after their own fashion.

Unless we understand the presence of that enemy, we shall not only miss
the point of Christianity, but even miss the point of Christmas. Christmas for
us in Christendom has become one thing, and in one sense even a simple thing.
But like all the truths of that tradition, it is in another sense a very
complex thing. Its unique note is the simultaneous striking of many notes; of
humility, of gaiety, of gratitude, of mystical fear, but also of vigilance and
of drama. It is not only an occasion for the peacemakers any more than for the
merry makers; it is not only a Hindu peace conference any more than it is only
a Scandinavian winter feast. There is something defiant in it also; something
that makes the abrupt bells at midnight sound like the great guns of a battle
that has just been won. All this indescribable thing that we call the Christmas
atmosphere only bangs in the air as something like a lingering fragrance or
fading vapor from the exultant, explosion of that one hour in the Judean hills
nearly two thousand years ago. But the savor is still unmistakable, and it is
something too subtle or too solitary to be covered by our use of the word
peace. By the very nature of the story the rejoicings in the cavern were
rejoicings in a fortress or an outlaws den; properly understood it' is not
unduly flippant to say they were rejoicing in a dug-out. It is not only true
that such a subterranean chamber was a hiding-place from enemies; and that the
enemies were already scouring the stony plain that lay above it like a sky. It
is not only that the very horse-hoofs of Herod might in that sense have passed
like thunder over the sunken head of Christ. It is also that there is in that
image a true idea of an outpost, of a piercing through the rock and an entrance
into an enemy territory. There is in this buried divinity an idea of
undermining the world; of shaking the towers and palaces from below; even as
Herod the great king felt that earthquake under him and swayed with his swaying
palace.

That is perhaps the mightiest of the mysteries of the cave. It is
already apparent that though men are said to have looked for hell under the
earth, in this case it is rather heaven that is under the earth. And there
follows in this strange story the idea of an upheaval of heaven. That is the
paradox of the whole position; that henceforth the highest thing can only work
from below. Royalty can only return to its own by a sort of rebellion Indeed
the Church from its beginnings, and perhaps especially in its beginnings, was
not so much a principality as a revolution against the prince of the world.
This sense that the world bad been conquered by the great usurper, and was in
his possession, has been much deplored or derided by those optimists who
identify enlightenment with case. But it was responsible for all that thrill of
defiance and a beautiful danger that made the good news seem to be really both
good and new. It was in truth against a huge unconscious usurpation that it
raised a revolt, and originally so obscure a revolt. Olympus still occupied the
sky like a motionless cloud molded into many mighty forms; philosophy still sat
in the high places and even on the thrones of the kings, when Christ was born
in the cave and Christianity in the catacombs.

In both cases we may remark the same paradox of revolution; the sense of
something despised and of something feared. The cave in one aspect is only a
hole or comer into Which the outcasts are swept like rubbish; yet in the other
aspect it is a hiding-place of something valuable which the tyrants are seeking
like treasure. In one sense they are there because the inn-keeper would not
even remember them, and in another because the king can never forget them. We
have already noted that this paradox appeared also in the treatment of the
early Church. It was important while it was still insignificant, and certainly
while it was still impotent. It was important solely because it was
intolerable; and in that sense it is true to say that it was intolerable
because it was intolerant. It was resented, because, in its own still and
almost secret way, it had declared war. It had risen out of the ground to wreck
the heaven and earth of heathenism. It did not try to destroy all that creation
of gold and marble; but it contemplated a world without it. It dared to look
right through it as though the gold and marble had been glass. Those who
charged the Christians with burning down Rome with firebrands were slanderers;
but they were at least far nearer to the nature of Christianity than those
among the moderns who tell us that the Christians were a sort of ethical
society, being martyred in a languid fashion for telling men they had a duty to
their neighbors, and only mildly disliked because they were meek and mild.

Herod had his place, therefore, in the miracle play of Bethlehem because
he is the menace to the Church Militant and shows it from the first as under
persecution and fighting for its life. For those who think this a discord, it
is a discord that sounds simultaneously with the Christmas bells. For those who
think the idea of the Crusade is one that spoils the idea of the Cross, we can
only say that for them the idea of the Cross is spoiled; the idea of the Cross
is spoiled quite literally in the cradle. It is not here to the purpose to
argue with them on the abstract ethics of fighting; the purpose in this place
is merely to sum up the combination of ideas that make up the Christian and
Catholic idea, and to note that all of them are already crystallized in the
first Christmas story. They are three distinct and commonly contrasted things
which are nevertheless one thing; but this is the only thing which can make
them one. The first is the human instinct for a heaven ,that shall be as
literal and almost as local as a home. It is the idea pursued by all poets and
pagans making myths; that a particular place must be the shrine of the god or
the abode of the blest; that fairyland is a land; or that the return of the
ghost must be the resurrection of the body. I do not here ,reason about the
refusal of rationalism to satisfy this need. I only say that if the
rationalists refuse to satisfy it, the pagans: will not be satisfied. This is
present in the story of Bethlehem and Jerusalem as it is present in the story
of Delos and Delphi, and as it is not present in the whole universe of
Lucretius or the whole universe of Herbert Spencer. The second element is a
philosophy larger than other philosophies; larger than that of Lucretius and
infinitely larger than that of Herbert Spencer. It looks at the world through a
hundred windows where the ancient stoic or the modem agnostic only looks
through one. It sees life with thousands of eyes belonging to thousands of
different sorts of people, where the other is only the individual standpoint of
a stoic or an agnostic. It has something for all moods of man, it finds work
for all kinds of men, it understands secrets of psychology, it is aware of
depths of evil, it is able to distinguish between real and unreal marvels and
miraculous exceptions, it trains itself in tact about bard cases, all with a
multiplicity and subtlety and imagination about the varieties of life which is
far beyond the bald or breezy platitudes of most ancient or modem moral
philosophy. In a word, there is more in it; it finds more in existence to think
about; it gets more out of life. Masses of this material about our many-sided
life have been added since the time of St. Thomas Aquinas. But St. Thomas
Aquinas alone would have found himself limited in the world of Confucius or of
Comte. And the third point is this; that while it is local enough for poetry
and larger than any other philosophy, it is also a challenge and a fight. While
it is deliberately broadened to embrace every aspect of truth, it is still
stiffly embattled against every mode of error. It gets every kind of man to
fight for it, it gets every kind of weapon to fight with, it widens its
knowledge of the things that are fought for and against with every art of
curiosity or sympathy; but it never forgets that it is fighting. It proclaims
peace on earth and never forgets why there was war in heaven.

This is the trinity of truths symbolized here by the three types in the
old Christmas story; the shepherds and the kings and that other king who warred
upon the children. It is simply not true to say that other religions and
philosophies are in this respect its rivals. It is not true to say that any one
of them combines these characters; it is not true to say that any one of them
pretends to combine them. Buddhism may profess to be equally mystical; it does
not even profess to be equally military. Islam may profess to be equally
military; it does not even profess to be equally metaphysical and subtle.
Confucianism may profess to satisfy the need of the philosophers for order and
reason; it does not even profess to satisfy the, need of the mystics for
miracle and sacrament and the consecration of concrete things. There are many
evidences of this presence of a spirit at once universal and unique. One will
serve here which is the symbol of the subject of this chapter; that no other
story, no pagan legend or philosophical anecdote or historical event, does in
fact affect any of us with that peculiar and even poignant impression produced
on us by the word Bethlehem. No other birth of a god or childhood of a sage
seems to us to be Christmas or anything like Christmas. It is either too cold
or too frivolous, or too formal and ,classical, or too simple and savage, or
too occult and complicated. Not one of us, whatever his opinions, would ever go
to such a scene with the sense that he was going home. He might admire it
because it was poetical, or because it was philosophical or any number of other
things in separation; but not because it was itself. The truth is that there is
a quite peculiar and individual character about the hold of this story on human
nature; it is not in its psychological substance at all like a mere legend or
the life of a great man. It does not exactly in the ordinary sense turn our
minds to greatness; to those extensions and exaggerations of humanity which are
turned into gods and heroes, even by the healthiest sort of hero worship. It
does not exactly work outwards, adventourously to the wonders to be found at
the ends of the earth. It is rather something that surprises us from behind,
from the hidden and personal part of our being; like that which can sometimes
take us off our guard in the pathos of small objects or the blind pieties of
the poor. It is rather as if a man had ,,found an inner room in the very heart
of his own house, which .,he had never suspected; and seen a light from within.
It is if he found something at the back of his own heart that ,betrayed him
into good. It is not made of what the world would call strong materials; or
rather it is made of materials whose strength is in that winged levity with
which they brush and pass. It is all that is in us but a brief tenderness that
there made eternal; all that means no more than a momentary softening that is
in some strange fashion become strengthening and a repose; it is the broken
speech and the lost word that are made positive and suspended unbroken; as the
strange kings fade into a far country and the mountains resound no more with
the feet of the shepherds; and only the night and the cavern lie in fold upon
fold over some-thing more human than humanity.